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Topic: Turkey to ban Twitter and Facebook (Read 10364 times)

TrxiZ

Social media could "provoke great masses”, said Binali Yıldırım, Turkey's Transportation, Maritime and Communication Minister, when he announced that the country is planning to block access to Facebook and Twitter in order to prevent a “threat to public safety.”

In May, the Turkish government announced the new measure would take place in August and thousands of Turks concentrated in some 40 cities and towns around the country. Turkey’s Internet regulator wanted to introduce a selection of filters that users would choose from before browsing the Internet. Also, some words could be banned, such as “blond” and “sister-in-law”.

According to the journalist Olcay Aydilek of the Turkish newspaper Habertürk, Yıldırım affirmed that social media is a “threat” and “measures must be taken.” The block would be momentary or last only a few hours, a report said.

Ministry's reports allegedly showed that the social networks acted as a "catalyst" that generated ethnic and religious confrontations at times of crisis, especially after attacks by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). For instance, in July two Turkish soldiers were killed and ten others were wounded in a clash with terrorists in south-eastern province of Hakkari.

Besides, Yıldırım appeared in the television saying that these kind of social sites were “very effective” after a deadly bomb attack in Gaziantep, near the police station, on 20 August, the second day of the Ramadan. People published on social sites "false reports of a second bombing, and claims that the Peace and Democracy Party offices in the city were torched. These are very troubling," he said.

Likewise, the minister stated that these platforms facilitated the revolutions in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, calling them “revolutions of communication.” He said that social media may have caused “good things to happen there but it could also be used to provoke great masses and misguide them.”

In an attempt to not be called as “censorship”, Yıldırım contacted Turkey's Information Technology and Communication Board (BTK) to create a balanced way to interfere with Turkish Internet users' access to Facebook and Twitter.

Turkey has 31 million Facebook users and 9 million Twitter users; 18,4 million of them use internet 34 hours per month.

The French organisation Reporters Without Borders released in March its list of the 12 “Enemies of the Internet”. China, Cuba, North Korea and Syria are at the top of the list, but other countries are under surveillance, such as Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia. However, with this new measure, Turkey may climb up soon a big number of positions.

TrxiZ

For the archives those people here have some insight sources in turkey and it is not 100% clear at the Moment what will happen next. This Thread has been started to prepare the people of a internet loss. it has not been created to create fear - but people should know what to do if something bad happens to their connections.

A massive anti-government protest in Istanbul, prompted after days of unrest were sparked by plans to redevelop one of the last remaining central public parks, appears to have led to a throttling of social media both in the city and across Turkey. TechCrunch has independently verified via a number of sources that both Facebook and Twitter have been almost impossible to access from inside Istanbul, and other parts of Turkey. There are also anecdotal reports of authorities switching off access in a localised manner around Taksim Square where thousands of people are demonstrating.

There have been violent scenes in Istanbul, with police firing tear gas and water cannons at people demonstrating against the erection of a shopping centre in a space widely considered to be a protected civic area. The demonstration has escalated into an anti-government and anti-corruption protest against an administration that has been in power since 2002.

Our sources – drawn from the tech community – say that around 99 percent of Facebook “doesn’t load” when accessed from Istanbul.

“They throttled the bandwith to the bare minimum so that officially it’s not blocked, but it’s not loading any more… it looks like the government is reducing the speed using TTNET which is the ISP they control,” said one, who declined to be named for fear of reprisal.

Another source told us: “3G is blocked.”

Another well-placed source at a tech accelerator told us: “We had problems in connecting internet today – mostly due to people trying to access through 3G network. However around 4pm local time access to Twitter and Facebook has been blocked on local ISP (two major ones TTNet and Superonline which among two have over 90% of the land line internet access). I connected through Acevpn and saw that the problem is not my home line but TTNet blocking the access to Twitter and Facebook.”

This source said this happened at a time where the tension was at its peak when protesters were trying to get into the target “Gezi Park” area. “After 30 minutes (approximately) the police withdrew from the area and Twitter Facebook access came back,” he told us.

A spokesperson from Facebook said the company declined to specifically comment on events in Turkey; however they issued the following statement: “The Internet provides people around the world with the power to connect, to learn, and to share. It is essential to communication and to commerce, and limiting Internet access for millions of people is a matter of concern for the global community.”

TrxiZ

Turkey's prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called social media "the worst menace to society", saying that it has been used to spread lies about the current anti-government protests taking place in the country.

The protests were triggered by plans to demolish Istanbul's Taksim Gezi Park to make way for what people thought was to be a shopping mall, but Mayor Kadir Topbas has since said is merely an enlarged pedestrian walkway.

Turkish police surrounded protestors, attacking them with chemical sprays, water cannons and teargas. The violence exercised by police triggered further protests across Turkey, which took on a broader anti-governmental cause. Protesters have put up barricades near the prime minister's office in the Besiktas district of Istanbul and more than 1,700 people have been arrested in 67 cities.

Protesters are worried that Erdogan's political party (AKP) is trying to impose conservative Islamic views on the secular country. Erdogan, meanwhile, is accusing his political opposition parties of provoking the demonstrations. He has also come out to say that Turkish intelligence is looking into possible links between the protests and "foreign powers".

He said in a press conference, reported in Turkish newspaper Hurriyet: "Our intelligence work is ongoing [to determine the foreign actors behind the protests]. It is not possible to reveal their names. But we will have meetings with their heads."

Erdogan rejects the claims that he is a dictator and insists that the protests are being carried out by an extremist minority. He has also lashed out at social media, which many protestors have turned to for information about the unrest.

He said in TV interview, reported in Radikal: "There is now a menace which is called Twitter. The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society."

The prime minister is en route to Morocco for an official visit. In a news conference at Istanbul airport before he left on 3 June, he urged people to be calm. "Be calm, relax, all this will be overcome," he said, "This is a protest organised by extremist elements."

Despite what he says about Twitter he can be found on the social networking site at @rt_erdogan with almost three million followers.

enrica

Haha Raven your irony rocks 8) At least this would show the true faces of those at the Govt.

A part from this, the issue is very serious: censorship and repression worths nothing, only sufference.And mixing religion with politics is extremely dangerous because it may lead to the exploitation of personal belief to repress political oppositors and to force the citiziens to behave as the government wants; to be added that it would totally repress even freedom of thought and expression. Very bad.

For what I know Turkey has spent decades of efforts to become a moderate, secular, democratic State.

It's so bad that the actual government is trying to limitate all the freedoms conquered in years of efforts.

Many Turkish Internet users are staying connected to Facebook and Twitter despite reported government censorship of the two sites.

To get past the blockade of the two popular social networks, Turkish citizens have been using VPN software such as Hotspot Shield, which opens a tunnel through the Internet so the connection can't be detected. This past weekend, more than 120,000 people in Turkey downloaded the software, according to the Guardian, a huge leap from the 10,000 new users seen on an average day.

On Saturday, blog site TechCrunch said a number of sources told it that both Facebook and Twitter have been impossible to access from inside Instanbul and other areas of Turkey.

Protests against Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan over restrictions on alcohol and other issues have triggered clashes with police, leading to injuries among many of the protesters and at least one death. Following reports that news organizations aren't fully covering the news, citizens in Turkey have been relying on social networks to send and receive information.

But Erdogan has actually blamed Twitter for fueling the protests, telling news site France 24 that "there is now a menace which is called Twitter. The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society.''

The level of the censorship against Facebook and Twitter is a bit of a question, however.

On Saturday, Internet monitoring company Renesys said it found no evidence that Turkey's Internet access was being blocked. The company added that it could not rule out the possibility of slowdowns, but said that might be due to increased traffic.

"It may be the case that some local Internet users are experiencing delays on oversubscribed DSL lines or mobile Internet connections," Renesys said in its Saturday blog.

Turkey's Prime Minister has labelled Twitter and other social networks as "the worst menace to society" following days of unrest in the country.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan's comments came after tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Istanbul to protest against government plans to demolish a public park to build a shopping centre.

Unsurprisingly, news and rumours about the marches quickly spread on Twitter, which appeared to have galvanised support in other parts of Turkey. Police used teargas on demonstrators in Turkey's biggest city Istanbul, and also in Izmir and the capital Ankara, which sparked further outcry.

Protests were then held across the country, and nearly 2,000 people are said to have been arrested in 67 towns and cities.

Erdogan attacked Twitter for spreading misinformation and helping to fuel the unrest in Turkey. Perhaps he was referring to tweets such as these...

enrica

It's not the 1st time the Turkish govt tries to ban a social media.Here in this 2008 cable it's reported they have tried to ban youtube, the WHOLE youtube, just for a stupid insulting thing to Ataturk, and the Turkish flag, instead of just filtering what was considered offensive:

***Summary: Turkish courts banned access to the immensely popular "YouTube" website for five days beginning January 17, to block a picture with swear words imposed over Turkey's founding father, Ataturk, and the Turkish flag. The GOT maintains the courts are properly implementing a new Internet law passed May 7, 2007. The incident -- the third time in the past year the GOT has blocked YouTube -- generated less media attention than past cases, and has yet to spur YouTube users to raise their collective voice. A prolonged ban or blockage of another popular youth site, such as "Facebook," could spark a more spirited response from Turkey's generally apolitical youth and might become another obstacle in Turkey's EU accession path. End summary. ***

In addition to Tor and Orbot as mentioned above, I also recommend the following to the people of Turkey (and anyone else under censorship):

This link has many alternatives to OSs, sites and software that tend to spy or be controlled by the Governments: http://prism-break.org/----------The Diaspora social network (as an alternative to Facebook, Twitter, etc):

----------Obfsproxy : uses Tor traffic for people where access to Tor is banned. It's also good for masking the fact that one is using Tor; makes it harder for ISPs/surveillance to know one is using Tor. "obfsproxy is a tool that attempts to circumvent censorship, by transforming the Tor traffic between the client and the bridge. This way, censors, who usually monitor traffic between the client and the bridge, will see innocent-looking transformed traffic instead of the actual Tor traffic. "

" Tails is a live DVD or live USB that aims at preserving your privacy and anonymity.It helps you to:

use the Internet anonymously almost anywhere you go and on any computer: all connections to the Internet are forced to go through the Tor network;leave no trace on the computer you're using unless you ask it explicitly;use state-of-the-art cryptographic tools to encrypt your files, email and instant messaging."

RiseUp: riseup.netRiseUp also offers a free VPN. The free email is invite-only, but one can also acquire an email account by submitting a request to RiseUp, who usually get back to you in a matter of days.